I am in the process of making myself happy again.

Limewire is a peer to peer file sharing system much the same as Napster. Admittedly I am about 5 years behind the rest of the world. I was recently put onto it by a mate, and I must say, a process which Lars Ulrich (the drummer from Metallica) has described as blatant theft is re'igniting an interest in music and culture that has long since been smothered by a raft of latent survival skills raising their ugly spectres as I concentrate on introducing a new life into the world.

Lars thinks Limewire is a form of theft. As the courts have and will. But to have theft one must first have possession. I don't believe in any form of possession, worldly or eternal, so I guess I don't believe in theft. It's easy for those with money and goods to believe in theft, for they have goods and money to be stolen. At the moment large wood chipping companies are cutting down vast tracts of old timber forest I believe to be mine as I inherited the natural world at birth, and yet I can't stop them because they have rights. Rights?

I am also a musician and song writer. By my reckoning, I have spent close to $50,000 on the art of making, buying and recording music, writing songs and playing in the last 10 years. I have not made back a cent. And I know all of you out there think, "oh you should have" by now, but to make a buck in the music business is as hard as feeding merino sheep glass. Very few succeed.

Yet Limewire is helping me love all things musical again. Especially my download of Nick Cave's My Beautiful World. I find it soul inspiring.

Did I buy it? No. Should I have to? Yes and no. Will I ever buy a Nick Cave CD, Ticket or Video again? Of course. If I have the money. I'm poor, you see. While the friends I went to school with are sitting on 80 grand a year, I have chosen to follow a creative path, to act, write, write songs, and perform. Have I made any money so far? No. But then you people are going to say that I am shit then. That if I had made it I'd be good somehow. That the market is everything, because popular choice is popular choice. Well it aint. Nick cave was a poor smacky for years and years. Tim Rogers can only just afford a house. Mozart was buried in a pauper's grave. And that was even before Limewire came along.

We are artists. We create because we have to, not because we get paid for it. We were born into it. It's not something you choose to do. Though there are some that can make a living out of it, in the end few do. Limewire isn't going to take away from those making a living out of it. If anything, it's gonna make music more accessible and get people excited about it. And in the end does it matter? So few people are willing to give the time of day to us artists, let alone pay us anything, that the majority don't know the soul until we are dead and gone, and we become like gold, because all the wealthy people, well most, who don't have a creative bone in their body or soul, orgasm over works of insight.

It is true. Otherwise, tomorrow, I would be offered a job as an artist. Because that's what I do. Create everyday. I have an imagination that refuses to see the world as it is. I seem to look beyond it.

I justify such theft on the basis on the tens of thousands of dollars I have previously spent on CDs, tapes and records, addicted to the music industry, pretending that the new Tom Waits release was my contemporary urban smack. Happy with my purchase I could sit on the couch with a glass of red and shoot off into a dreamlike state for hours, studying the colours of the wall opposite me, listening to a mad great bang garbage cans and rasp out a tale about bloody Alice in Wonderland.

I cannot find whole albums on Limewire. Why would you? I can find singular songs. Perhaps if I stayed on Limewire for days, long enough to find other users on at the same time who had the whole album in bits I may download it. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't buy it. Sure, I can burn it onto CD, but having a burnt CD, though the quality is the same, it is not the same as having the real thing. It's like buying Calvin Klein underwear copies from Target.

Unfortunately, with a baby on the way I simply don't have the dispensable income to go and buy the work of all the artists I love.

If the artists are unhappy about not making money a great alternative would be to busk! Sure, maybe the worst buskers are struggling, but I reckon if Buddy Guy sat down at Circular Quay one Sunday Arvo and put out the hat, he'd make a fair quid. But someone like Buddy Guy may say, I don't need to do that anymore. I can put on concerts and make a great deal of cash. Or simply I already have enough money, why should I busk?

If you have enough money, then you don't really need to make money of CD sales do you? Oh but it's breaching your rights.

In argument you could stop making music. You could chuck a Prince, and start making really bad music to get out of the whole thing, so that people wouldn't put your new stuff on Limewire, then what would they care? Limewire works on popularity anyway. You generally can't download the lesser known stuff because it works on what people like and have. To get the lesser known stuff, if you want it, you generally have to go and buy it.

Finding a live version of George Harrison, Paul Simon, and Bob Dylan, is like being given a little whiff of the high'grade stuff, and having the dealer say, "I don't have anymore, you'll have to go out looking." So I can go down to a niche music shop that stocks rarities and back catalogue stuff, and I can keep him afloat by avoiding the Gloria Jeans of music, HMV and Virgin. So it keeps afloat a part of the industry which was once being gobbled up by giants.

Plus, I can collect stuff which has never been released, or not to my knowledge. One is hardly going release a whole CD of Hunter S Thompson's lectures, let alone listen to it in one sitting, however it can inspire the entrepreneur to make a collection of the most viewed hits on Limewire, and release a CD of the work, thus creating more streams of income, and sending royalties back to the creators and their estates.

Lars doesn't need more money.

Or in Blind Melon's case, it is so great to hear Shannon Hoon sing a song and ad lib that he doesn't want to die. Sad.

I can collect my whole back catalogue again. And anyways, most of the stuff I'm getting is stuff I have already bought once, and in the long 20 year period of collecting music, I have lost along the way. I have already paid for it, why buy it again. And then there's the plethora of Robert Johnson tunes. I don't have to go searching for old records or really bad CDs. I can make my own collection.

In the case of Supertramp, I am amazed that most of the songs I can download are the ones they chose for their best of collection anyway (which being an avid fan upsets me a little). Limewire actually shows me how little taste changes and as a research tool it is a great way to gauge the importance of some songs. I can only assume that these older bands are gathering a new fan base through their presence on soundtracks, as people have simply typed in Magnolia, looking for that song that they liked. What was it called? The Logical Song? From this they are introduced to a whole raft of stuff the band has produced, and wham, you've got another generation of fans.

It is also interesting to note the number of people who have no idea who wrote what song: it seems there are quite a few out there who believe the Kinks wrote My Sharona and What I like about You. The poor Romantics. All those people buying Kinks CDs thinking it was them... Baaaah!

'It was a dangerous occupation being a musician in those days: Musicians hated you if you played better than them. Women hated you if you cast your eye on anyone else. And the men hated you if the women loved you'

I can listen to a man recorded in the 30s who arguably influenced the way music was to be played in the last 75 years. He's out of copyright in Australia and the States. I have the pleasure of skipping the middleman and listening to him for free, though murky businessmen have licensed the 2 remaining photographs of the man, so I would have to pay someone unrelated to the genius a fee for the use of the materials which have no connection to them at all. By using Limewire, I am indulging in the sheer joy of listening to a man who by all accounts was killed by poison. I don't have to pay one of the music publishing companies who would claim profits on a man they never knew, and a man, who a the time, few white people would have endorsed.

There is no foundation for the argument that peer to peer shareware is theft or taking away from artistic profits. To make a profit as an artist is no mean feat and is usually reserved for the Alex Lloyds or the Mobys at the top of the food chain, whose main income revenues is not from CD sales but from selling their songs to advertisements.

Limewire ensures me hours of delicious listening. I will not stop buying music or musical instruments and I will never stop going to gigs. Even if I manage to download a whole Tom Waits album I would happily pay more than $200 to see him live in Australia, though the chances of him touring anytime soon are slim. That $200, what with most of his back catalogue stuff on sale anyway, could probably buy 10 of his CDs, of which I already have anyway. I have paid Cake $60 for the pleasure of their show. I have downloaded 6 of their tracks, taking away $6 from their income stream. Go figure.

I recently rented 'Festival Express', a documentary about a collection of festivals promoted in the early 70's, where the likes of The Band, Buddy Guy, The Grateful Dead, and Janis Joplin travelled in a reconditioned train to each one. A great party and a good watch. The DVD featured live performances and music no doubt licensed to the artists and their estates. Here flows another income stream. As a result of watching the movie, my interest in Janis, sparked by some amazing live performances, was re'awakened. Instead of going to the CD shop to buy her music, I went to Limewire and have downloaded about 5 of her songs. Sure I'm going to download more, but the fact that I have downloaded them has increased my interest in her tenfold. In the future, I will definitely buy her collection, as it will be republished by some record company or another, taking most of the cream off the top, because it is simpler than trying to put it together on Limewire. Product is product, and people most certainly pay when it is good.

Its funny because a big part of the 'Festival Express' DVD was devoted to students claiming that they should be allowed into the festivals for free. The police protected the festivals and interests of the promoter and there were riots between the students and the police. The musicians ended up abusing concert goers for bashing up cops, because they had to make a living somehow. At the end of the day they put on some free concerts and everyone was happy. The promoter lost a shit'load of cash on the tour, but looking back on it, happily reminisced about the fantastic time had by all, and that the real thrust of the thing was to get all the musos on a train jamming and playing music. The idea wasn't really to make money anyway. Has anything changed? Or are the big lads in the record companies simply pissed off that the talent of others won't buy them that new BMW anymore? Limewire seems to be music for music's sake. Unreal.

Recently seeing 'Some Kind of Monster' I downloaded some Metallica. And you know what Lars? You can keep it. I haven't bought one of your albums for so long cause the latest stuff is terrible. I wouldn't even want to listen to it even when it is free. On the topic of Napster, Lars said, "It is therefore sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is." in a statement published on the Elketra Records Website . What is a record then? Certainly an economist of the barest thought would call a CD for sale an 'article of commerce'.

Stay tuned for more on Limewire in next month's issue of The Cud...